Immoral earnings is killing governments all over the world.

Big business-biased'reform' won't fly

Based on an article by Ross Gittins

This year will see the economy performing better than many people expect in spite of gov'ts budget cuts.

Anyone who thinks the top two reforms we have to make are the tax system and industrial relations is confusing electors.

Self interest groups such as big business and the rich are pressuring governments to change laws and regulations in ways that advantage them at the expense of others.

The tax "debate" what do you see?

Big business and high income-earners want to pay less tax – a cut in the rate of company tax and in the top personal tax rate. If that means other people paying higher tax, through a higher goods and services tax, so be it.

They  assure us that it will trickle down to the punters, we've heard this tired argument many times before.

The advocates of such reforms never spell out the mechanisms by which lower rates of tax for the big end of town are supposed to be transformed into greater effort to "work, save and invest", what empirical evidence is there, none!

How far will Malcolm Turnbull go in seeking to give his party's business backers the "reform" they seek. If he doesn't go far, they'll say he is gutless. Perhaps it will be because he's not totally stupid. Changing the tax system to favour the well-off will always be hard to sell to the rest of the electorate.

Industrial relations reform, there's never been a time when it's less needed. Not a reform that gives employers more power to limit the wage rises of their workers.
This stuff is wishful thinking by bosses.

The political journalists' conclusion that Fraser(Reserve bank) was warning of the imminent loss of our AAA credit rating missed the point altogether. He was openly correcting his masters' repeated contention that a return to "growth and jobs" would fix everything  (mysteriously brought about by business-biased tax reform) would fix the budget problem.

So he's saying there's no substitute for hard decisions to cut spending(concessions at the top end) and raise taxes.

The Malcolm Turnbull government, if it sticks to its political ideology that higher taxes are the greatest economic evil, so the only acceptable way to return the budget to surplus is to slash government spending his gov't is doomed.

While this mentality rests easily in the minds of conservative governments – and Treasury secretaries – in practice it's almost impossible to implement such unpopular policies because it shifts the burden of repair towards welfare recipients and ordinary wage-earners, the electorate is sick and tired of high income-earners using concessions and loopholes to pay less tax.

If we never get back to budget surplus, such ideological bias and pig-headedness will be a big part of the reason. Governments of all persuasions in this country are loath to take on their backers, be they unions and big business.

We will have to get used to running deficits I fear, even though our deficits are quite small when we look at the global picture.